HISD chief honing controversial ideas

STEVE MARK

Published 6:00 pm, Tuesday, February 16, 2010

In advance of his first Houston ISD State of the Schools address Friday, Superintendent Terry Grier has spent considerable time this week meeting with the district’s principals. Understandably, much of the dialogue centered on the two hot topics of the past week: Grier’s push for extended-year schools and the Board of Trustees’ vote last week to allow student test score results to teacher evaluation criteria (see page 4A for stories).

Grier’s initial hurdles with the extended-school initiative are twofold, mainly due to semantics. First is the district explanation that the program is merely an addition of more school days to the regularly-scheduled calendar. The other is that the program is optional, not mandatory, to district schools.

“I was surprised at the amount of energy and interest and excitement,” said Grier at a media roundtable Tuesday.

Grier said he has already heard from leadership at one school — the superintendent won’t divulge which one — that wants to switch to the extended plan. This feedback is preliminary, as the district intends to get parent input before implementing any change at a campus.

Initial discussion with the principals brought about a request that Grier didn’t originally consider; some principals suggested that an extended-year program would be most effective if utilized in high school/middle and elementary clusters involving schools in a particular feeder pattern. Grier’s idea is to introduce the longer school year calendar at low-performing high schools.

The superintendent has thrown another wrinkle into the mix for low-performing high schools. Grier would like to turn such schools into four separate “academies” starting with ninth-grade classes, dividing students into disciplines such as health science, green technology and communications. Students in grades 10-12 would still be part of a “traditional” classroom structure.

“Our expectations would be that our kids are college bound,” said Grier.

As for the controversial addition of value-added scores as part of the 34-point criteria for teacher evaluation, Grier said he hopes to meet with the head of the Houston Federation of Teachers, Gayle Fallon, in hopes of designing a training program for teachers whose student scores put instructors in jeopardy of losing their jobs. More than 700 teachers showed up at HISD headquarters Feb. 11 as the board voted on the value-added issue.

“I think she’d be willing to do that,” said Grier of Fallon.

Fallon has not discussed the potential détente meeting with Grier, though she told The Examiner: “I’m always open to meeting with any superintendent about any topic.”

Having said that, Fallon repeated her threat to pursue legal action in the wake of the board vote.

“There are serious issues of transparency in a system that relies on a proprietary formula to come up with the value-added number so the people being evaluated have no clue as to the exact means by which they are evaluated,” said Fallon.